Shelby's Life and Whatnot

Whirlwind--and Good News!

This past several days has been an absolute whirlwind. Wednesday I had an appointment in the morning and ran several important errands, then came home in time to rush to Chinese class, where I got a perfect score on a quiz I didn't even know was coming (it was a listening comprehension quiz). Yay me! Thursday I worked all day. And Friday? Friday was a bundle of excitement!

We finally got our "Notice of Favorable Determination Concerning Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition"--more commonly known as the I-171H form. With that in our hands (I drove up to LA to pick it up), we rushed over to AAA to get everything notarized (funny story there in a second). Then we FedExed it to a friend of mine in Sacramento where she will hand-carry all of our documents into the Secretary of State's office for "certification." Certification is where the Secretary of State verifies the identity of the notaries (or in our case, notary) who signed the documents. We'll get those back this week and then drop them off at the Chinese Consulate where they will verify the identity of the State of California. Then if all goes well, it goes to our agency and is reviewed, then translated and sent off to China! We're in the home stretch here!

So funny story about the AAA Club. We went to our bank, Washington Mutual, to ask about notarizations since most banks (except them) do it for free. They don't. The other notaries we found charged $15 per signature--we had 14 signatures. We heard that the AAA Club did them for a reduced rate. We had the "classic" membership with AAA, which is their lowest level of coverage and includes $7 notarizations. When we got there, the woman said "Oh, you can upgrade to Premier and get free notarizations!" Well how much does that cost? "$56" Okay, let's see--14 signatures times $7 per signature--$98.00--hey, sign us up for Premier! So now we have our documents and 200 miles of free towing!